Language and Race

Language and race are deeply implicated in Western thought because the rise of language studies not only paralleled the rise in race thinking but they were seen, throughout the nineteenth century, to be virtually synonymous. The link between philology and ethnology provided a powerful foundation for the marriage of linguistic hegemony and racial marginalisation that came to be fundamental to imperial discourse. But, ironically, that spurious link had a powerful residual effect on the thinking of post-colonial writers and intellectuals in the twentieth century, who often saw strategies of resistance in terms of the ‘racial’ autonomy of mother tongues. The dangerous inheritance of the link between language and race is a model for the problems surrounding all discursive resistance. There is a case to be made for the assertion that the idea of race exists entirely in language. But to understand the link between language and race, we must go back long before the emergence of race as a category of physiological discrimination, to the uses of language in ‘othering’ the subjects of Europe’s colonial expansion. In 1492 Christopher Columbus’ mistaken information that the island of the Canibales was peopled by a erce tribe who ate intruders, led to the term ‘cannibal’ usurping ‘anthropophagy’ for all time as a description of the practice of eating human esh (Hulme, 1986, p. 19). More importantly, ‘cannibal’ provided the term for the Other, a word for what came to be the absolute abjection of human life, the ultimate other of civilised being. The proto-racial relationships established by European expansion found one of their most powerful descriptions in Shakespeare’s The Tempest in which the monster Caliban, whose name is adapted from ‘Cannibal’ (Carib-CanibalCaliban), represents the primitive child of nature in ungrateful rebellion against

Prospero's civilising culture. As Prospero's terms of address to Caliban indicate -'hag-seed', 'lying slave', 'vile race', 'freckled whelp', 'tortoise', -the language of authority and discrimination, which underlies the language of race, need bear no empirical relation to their subject. Indeed the terms deployed during the ourishing of race thinking in the nineteenth century very often bore only the most fanciful relation to the appearance of actual human beings. Race descriptions, like Prospero's terms to Caliban, 1 obtain their power not by verisimilitude, but by the extent to which they embody the epistemic violence of colonialism itself. In this respect the language of race, like all language, is centred in, and generated by, relations of power.
Salman Rushdie demonstrates this when he outlines a 'whole declension of patronising terminology' in the language of inter-racial relations in Britain. Not only does the terminology of race have nothing to do with reality but neither, apparently, does the language of race relations: At rst, we are told, the goal was 'integration'. Now this word rapidly came to mean 'assimilation': a black man could only become integrated when he started behaving like a white one. After 'integration' came the concept of 'racial harmony'. Now once again, this sounded virtuous and desirable, but what it meant in practice was that blacks should be persuaded to live peaceably with whites, in spite of all the injustices done to them every day. The call for 'racial harmony' was simply an invitation to shut up and smile while nothing was done about our grievances. And now there's a new catchword: 'multiculturalism' … Multiculturalism is the latest token gesture towards Britain's blacks, and it ought to be exposed, like 'integration' and 'racial harmony', for the shame it is. (1991 p. 137) Language exists as much to conceal as to signify. The language of inter-racial relations is a demonstration of the importance of use in meaning. Whatever admirable relations such terminology signi es, the use of such language can be a way of embedding racist attitudes. Indeed, the embedding of such attitudes is fundamental to the language of race itself.
'Race' was rst used in the English language in 1508 in a poem by William Dunbar, and through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it remained essentially a literary word denoting a class of persons or things. It was only in the late eighteenth century that the term came to mean a distinct category of human beings with physical characteristics transmitted by descent. Humans had been categorised in terms of their biological difference from the late 1600s when Francois Bernier postulated a number of distinctive categories, based largely on facial character and skin colour. Soon a hierarchy of groups (not yet termed races) came to be accepted, with white Europeans at the top. The Negro or black African, or later the Australian Aborigine, was usually relegated to the bottom, in part because of black Africans' colour and allegedly 'primitive' culture, but primarily because they were best known to Europeans as slaves. Immanuel Kant's use of the German phrase for 'races of mankind' in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime in 1764 was probably the rst explicit use of the term in the sense of biologically or physically distinctive categories of human beings. Kant here elaborates on Hume's 1748 essay 'Of National Characteristics' which makes the familiar claim that there 'never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white'. Hume averred that 'such a uniform and constant difference' could not happen if it was not a fundamental fact of nature. Clearly then, Kant's use of the term 'race' was based on a deep and pervasive chromatism, a sense that a group's unchangeable physical characteristics -its colour -could be linked in a direct, causal way to psychological nature or intellectual abilities. Kant claims that 'so fundamental is the difference between the races of man … it appears to be as great in mental capacities as in colour ' (1764, p. 111). The term 'race' was therefore inserted by Kant into a long-standing vocabulary of discrimination, already present in taxonomies such as Bernier's, which were rmly based on colour difference. By the nineteenth century colour had become the unquestioned sign of the relation between external characteristics and inner capacities, despite its complete metaphoricity, arbitrariness and unreliability in describing those external features. It is in the use of colour terms that the dominance of linguistic tradition over observation comes into play. For the colour terms -'black', 'white', 'yellow', 'red' -by which racial typology was organised, bear no relation to anything in reality. 'Who has seen a black or red person, a white, a yellow, or brown?', asks Henry Louis Gates (1986, p. 6). Nevertheless 'black' and 'white' have become the most powerful signi ers in the contemporary racial landscape. No two words have had the momentous and catastrophic consequences of the words 'white' and 'black': no two words so completely encompass the binarism of Western culture, or have such profound cultural rami cations. Yet these two words, which have bound us rmly into a race discourse based on the binary of light and its absence, were not inevitable. Other words, even colour terms, might have been employed to describe the gradation of physical types conceived by Francois Bernier. But white, black, red, yellow, came to be the markers of racial difference. Would not some other, more speci c, less arbitrary words have served better? Or was the distinction between light and darkness, purity and corruption, good and evil an already overdetermined binary into which racial classi cation slipped effortlessly?
Light has had an importance in Western culture since the Greeks, and the concomitant link between seeing and knowing, the link between light and spiritual illumination have had a profound effect on Western thinking. But why didn't blue, the colour of the sky, or yellow, the colour of the sun, and brown, the colour of the earth emerge as the dominant binary? Why this ultimate polarity of white and black? The reason seems to lie in the fascination light had for the western imagination, both in religious and philosophical terms. The ultimate binary -white and black -embodied the distinction between light and its absence. The secret of this stunningly economical binary is the very secret of race, the secret of the persistence of this quite spurious category of human identi cation. But the question remains: what do these terms signify? Does racial classi cation offer the ultimate deconstruction of language itself? It is in these words -black and white -that we see the true complexity of 'racial' difference and at the same time the deferral of signi cation.
The English philosopher, David Hume, who came to hold the post of Under Secretary of State, wrote: I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to whites. There scarcely was ever a civilized nation of that complexion, not even any individual eminent in action of speculation. No ingenious manufacturers amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient GERMANS, the present TARTARS, have still something eminent about them. (An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth in Opposition to Sophistry and Skepticism, cited in Eze, 1997, p. 7) Here the difference between whites and 'Negroes' (negre, black) is a constant, original distinction established in nature. The black race is cast as existing outside 'proper', i.e. white, humanity. 'And', says Emmanuel Eze, for the Enlightenment philosophers, European humanity was not only universal, but the embodiment of, and coincident with, humanity as such, the framing of the African as being of a different, subhuman species, therefore philosophically and anthropologically sanctioned the exploitations of Africans in barbaric ways that were not allowed for Europeans. (1997, p. 7) It is signi cant that in Enlightenment thinking the colour hierarchy of the races was cast in terms of the primary colours. For the primary colours represented a taxonomy that had a purchase in Nature. Thus the 'natural' gradation of colours could be adapted to a gradation of race, the only connection being the colour term. The step from the physical taxonomy to the assumption of inherent qualities was apparently very simple. Kant ' (1764, p. 113), indicates the core feature of Enlightenment race thinking, that colour was the self-evident sign of inherent rational and moral capacities, diminishing as they deviated from the white. The biological, phrenological, craniological and philological studies which de ned, categorised and described racial types in the nineteenth century appear now to be elaborate ctions, invested with an absurd amount of intellectual energy. They are an elaboration of the ' ctionality' of language itself, the arbitrary link between signi er and signi ed. But the experience of race, the 'fact of blackness' as Frantz Fanon put it, is no less real for its empirical ctionality. Language has always 'inscribed' rather than 'described' human difference through such chromatic signi ers. Those signi ers have had an indispensable function in colonial relations and have been notoriously dif cult to dislodge. But the paradox of race is that the reality of racial experience centres, not in physical typology, or 'community of blood' or genetic variation, but in language. This occurs in two ways: the development of the concept of linguistic races which saw language and race as inseparable, and the gurative power of language in which chromatic signi ers performed the cultural work of racial 'othering'.
The very term 'black' achieved its connotation in Plato as a sign of lack, of absence. Black came to evoke evil very early in European history, and was allied to concepts of sin, treachery, ugliness, lth and degradation, night and mourning, while 'white' came to be associated with cleanliness, purity, beauty, virginity and peace (Bolt, 1971, p. 131). These terms re-emerged ambivalently in abolitionist literature such as Blake's 'Little Black Boy': My mother bore me in the southern wild And I am black, but O! my soul is white; White as an angel is the English child: But I am black as if bereaved of light.
The development of the language of race had its broadest and most in uential signi cance in the emergence of the myth of the 'Dark Continent' shaped by the political and economic pressures of the Victorian period (Brantlinger, 1988, pp. 173-97). The strength of such representation in colonialism arises from the arbitrary adaptability of these signi ers which circulate within the very clear boundaries of imperial binarism, binaries such as: coloniser/colonised; white/ non-white; civilised/primitive. Whatever cultural, biological or pseudoscienti c terms have been invoked to describe 'racial' variation, the distinction comes down nally to that existing between the imperial powers and their others. Consider the assertion by William Lawrence in 1822: the mind of the Negro and the Hottentot, of the Calmuck and the Carib, is inferior to that of the European and also their organization is less perfect … In all particulars … the Negro structure approximates unequivocally to that of the monkey. It not only differs from the Caucasian model; but is distinguished from it in two respects; the intellectual characters are reduced, the animal features enlarged and exaggerated. (Stepan, 1981, p. 15) Here, Lawrence con ates several kinds of non-European together in his racial classi cation, supported by assertions which, though absurd, had become commonplace because they attempted to explain the biological continuity from ape to homo sapiens. This fundamental distinction between white and non-white holds today (by both 'white' and 'black'), as does the unstable and arbitrary nature of racial signi ers. This racial Manicheanism, arising to appease the hegemonic pretensions of imperial powers, was greatly advanced by the invention of the concept of the Aryan race, which itself was the product of the new science of philology. Despite the heavy investment in biological taxonomy in nineteenth century anthropology, it was the link between race and language which most rmly embedded the concept of race in western thought. Curiously, the vagueness and imprecision of racial terms, rather than diminish this xation, merely served to exacerbate it, by fostering a language that was protean in its application. As Henry Gates points out, race is the ultimate trope of difference because it is so very arbitrary in its application … The biological difference used to determine 'difference' in sex simply do not hold when applied to 'race'. Yet we carelessly use language in such a way as to will this sense of natural difference into our formulations. (1986, p. 5) For these reasons race has become 'a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of speci c belief systems'. Paradoxically, in the wake of colonial occupation, with its strongly developed practical racism, race remains the most unstable and misleading, yet strategic focus of representation in post-colonial societies.

Race and Philology
Widespread interest in the link between language and race really began in the late eighteenth century with the discovery of the Indo-European family of languages and the subsequent rise of philology -comparative or historical linguistics -which developed out of an interest in the link between language and the essential identity of communities. While the concept of 'race' might exist entirely in language, a convenient and protean trope of Otherness, philology became the major impetus in the myth of the link between language and race as the diversity of languages was used to explain the diversity of races.
Consequently, the English historian Edward Freeman could say with con dence in 1879 that the 'doctrine of race, in its popular form, is the direct offspring of the study of scienti c philology' (Freeman, 1879, p. 31). Although 'language is no certain test of race, the men who speak the same tongue are not therefore necessarily men of the same blood', nevertheless 'the natural instinct of mankind connects race and language' ( p. 32). Freeman, writing around the height of Britain's own imperial expansion, sums up a century of thinking on the dif cult links between language and identity: If races and nations, though largely formed by the workings of an arti cial law, are still real and living things, groups in which the idea of kindred is the idea around which everything has grown, how are we to de ne our races and nations? How are we to mark them off from one another? … I say unhesitatingly that for practical purposes there is one test, and one only, and that that test is language. (p. 33) Freeman is splendidly vague about how that test may be applied, how language and race are linked, or even how the communal metaphors of nation and race may be distinguished. His con dence rested on a century of philolog-ical study, but neither the dif cult distinction between nation and race, nor the precise way in which languages could be said to characterise groups of people had been resolved. Clearly the establishment of an empire extends the qualities of the (English) nation into the qualities of the (Anglo-Saxon) race. Although, as J.A. Hobson pointed out at the turn of the century, imperialism is 'the expansion of nationality' (Hobson, 1902, p. 6) it was overwhelmingly conceived in terms of the expansion of the British, or Anglo-Saxon race. Arguably, its major vehicle was neither trade nor war, but the English language.
Language was only one feature of a broad array of concepts invoked to elaborate the idea of racial grouping and inheritance. Freeman demonstrates something of the mental gymnastics employed by those determined to propound the link: Community of language does not imply community of blood; it might be added that diversity of language does not imply diversity of blood. But community of language is, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, a presumption of community of blood, and is proof of something which for practical purposes is the same as community of blood. (1879, p. 34) There is no link between community of language and community of blood yet 'for practical purposes' we can pretend they are the same thing. The almost meaninglessly gurative, and much used term -'community of blood'becomes a tautology for 'race' which language is supposed to de ne. In this circumlocution we nd the beginnings of the paradox with which race is to gain its grip on contemporary thought. Though a widely disputed category of biological variation, the assumption of its presence in language, including the protean nature of racial metaphors, mean that linguistically it becomes ineradicable.
Despite the imsiness of arguments about the essential links between language and race, the rise of philology was synonymous with the rise of race thinking. The discovery of the Indo-European family of languages in 1786 by British Orientalist and jurist William Jones, ushered in a new conception of linguistic history. 2 However, it was Friedrich Schlegel who gave Jones' statement an anthropological twist by deducing from the relationship of language a relationship of race (Poliakov, 1977, p. 191). In his enthusiastic prospectus for a science of comparative philology Schlegel's lasting legacy was to galvanise German youth with the myth of an Aryan race. 'This linguistic research', says Poliakov, 'produced fateful results in a eld where everything depends on words'. Henceforth, 'the authentic and useful science of linguistics became absorbed in the crazy doctrine of 'racial anthropology" (p. 193).
Philology tended to be assimilated to the natural sciences because it revealed a natural human capacity expressing itself in a deterministic manner, beyond the control of individual human will, but susceptible to a rigorous systematic study that demonstrated underlying laws. (Poliakov, 1977, p. 24) Consequently it provided the basis for the study called 'ethnology' or 'the science of human races'. Philology lent its methodological rigour to trace the af nities of all the various 'races' of man, and if possible to reduce their present diversity to a primitive unity analogous to that of the Indo-European language family. (p. 24) The persistent confusion between language and race (underpinned no doubt by the need of imperial powers to nd some basis for de ning their dominance over their colonial populations) was compounded by the developing belief that languages were species with lives of their own. In 1863 August Schleicher in his Die Darwinische Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft contended that languages possess 'that succession of phenomena to which one ordinarily applies the term 'life", from which he concluded that 'linguistic science is therefore a natural science' (Brew, 1968, p. 176). The very concept of an Indo-European 'family' of languages and the development of a linguistic family tree inevitably encouraged the perception that language evolution replicated biological and cultural phylogeny. Although the organic analogy had many detractors it maintained a hold on popular thinking in a way that inevitably cemented the link between the racial characteristics of speakers and the languages they spoke. Furthermore, a family tree diagram posits a hierarchy of branchings over time which rests on a view of history as a movement from primitive to ever more highly developed languages and peoples. This, of course, links the development of languages to Darwin's theory of species evolution and its associated doctrine of the survival of the ttest. In uential British anthropologist Edward Tylor held that although words such as 'savage' and 'barbarous' had come to mean 'such behaviour as is most wild, rough and cruel', 'savage and barbarous tribes often more or less fairly represent stages of culture through which our own ancestors passed long ago' (Bolt, 1971, p. 25). The increasing attempt to provide comparative linguistics with a rmly scienti c footing parallels the late nineteenth century attempts to provide a scienti c basis for the analysis of race. Both rested on rigid hypotheses which ignored exceptions and bore little relationship to empirical evidence. An example of this was the 'neogrammarian' hypothesis, which provides a telling example of the strong appeal of scienti c laws to linguistics analysis. 3 German philology is crucial to the development of the discipline because the link between language and racial or national identity had been instrumental in the development of modern Germany. Germany was different from other societies, in that 'the idea of a common genealogy was preceded by that of a common tongue -the German language which the clerks opposed to other languages' (Poliakov, 1977, p. 74). This is exactly the differentiation underlying the development of ethnology in the nineteenth century. 'Thus', says Poliakov, after a thousand years, a community of feeling which had been expressed originally in terms of language came to be formulated in terms of race as though these concepts, which became interchangeable, covered the same deep, psycho-historical reality. (1977, p. 74) For these reasons German philology was particularly amenable to anthropolog-ical questions of race, which became deeply implicated in assumptions about national character. German ideas of Kultur which was preferred to the English concept of 'civilisation' involved a link between language and race which became taken for granted.
This deep cultural af nity between language and national character led philologers such as Theodor Waitz to justify the in uence of linguistics on two grounds: the characteristics of language are more stable than racial or ethnoracial qualities and thus provided a more reliable guide to historical continuity; and the methods of comparative philology had reached a higher stage of exactitude than those of physical anthropology (Poliakov, 1977, p. 258). Claiming that 'all uncultured nations possess, in comparison with civilised nations, a large mouth and somewhat thick lips' (Whitman, 1984, p. 220), Waitz believed in the in uence of intellectual culture on physical form, and asserted that as a primitive community rose to a higher culture, the thick lips would be lost. To develop a sound fundamental understanding of man in his scienti cally explicable physiological and psychical aspects, it was necessary to study 'uncivilised nations, man in his primitive state ' (1984, p. 221). Cultural scholars had, in effect, created a new academic territory -primitive life -in order to banish their materialist rivals to it.
The creation of language was the common act of prehistoric communities and the ground of common human existence. But differences in language were held to indicate differences in moral and mental capacities. Humboldt had inspired the doctrine that of the three kinds of languages -the isolating, the agglutinative and the in ected -the in ected languages, such as Indo-European and Semitic, were superior. Consequently for philologers such as Steinthal, because all thought was linguistic, the structure of a language could determine the mental capabilities of its speakers. This notion became developed in Renan's study of the Semitic languages and formed a basis for the link between language and race, because the mental dimension of a particular language could be seen to be analogous to the moral and cultural dimension of a race.

Ernest Renan and Linguistic Races
The assumption that language is so integral to human life that it determines one's world, or conversely, that the character of one's social and cultural being determines the language one speaks, has been a persistent feature of discourse on language. This assumption has a long history. The emergence of racialist theory in the nineteenth century found many of its principal exponents in those French thinkers most deeply in uenced by the emerging Orientalism of Napoleonic France. People such as Michel Buffon and Count Arthur de Gobineau are well known for their development of race thinking and for ideas which, from the perspective of the twenty-rst century, seem absurdly ethnocentric. But the philologist-historian who had the most to say about the link between race and language was Ernest Renan. Renan was a voluminously productive and extraordinarily in uential Orientalist whose career spanned three quarters of the nineteenth century. Renan's writing is not so much signi cant for its originality of thought as it is for the way in which his copious writings re ected the European intellectual milieu of the time, reproducing in distilled form the major Orientalist myths of language, race and culture.
Renan's life work was a monumental description of the Semitic language, religion and history yet his fundamental belief was that this 'race of religions' was destined to give way to the 'Indo-Germanic' race whose inheritance of science and rationality gave them the nal responsibility for the philosophical search after truth. The opposition between the Semitic and the Aryan, was, for Renan, incontrovertibly in favour of the latter, being an 'opposition between reason and faith, between truth and revelation, between philosophy (or science) and religion' between Semitic unity and Aryan multiplicity (Todorov, 1993, p. 146).
Renan rejected the notion of biological races, proffering instead the theory of 'linguistic races' which demonstrate a cultural determinism every bit as rigid as the biological determinism of people such as Gobineau. For him there were no pure races, indeed, 'the noblest countries -England, France, Italy -are those in which the blood is most mixed' (Todorov, 1993, p. 140). Renan is adamant that 'race' itself refers to two things: a physical race and a cultural race, and that one must be careful not to confuse the two. Language is the key for Renan, because language plays a dominant role in the formation of a culture.
Language is thus almost completely substituted for race in the division of humanity into groups, or rather the word 'race' changes meaning. Language, religion, laws, mores brought the race into being much more than blood did. (Renan, 1887, p. 32) The Semitic race and the Aryan race, which focus most of Renan's attention, are not physical races but linguistic races.
As the individuality of the Semitic race has been revealed only by the analysis of language, an analysis particularly well corroborated … as this race has been created by philology, there is just one criterion for recognizing Semites, and that is language. (Renan, 1855, p. 80) According to Renan, there are ve 'documents' which determine a race within the human species: a separate language, a literature with identi able characteristics, a religion, a history, and a civilisation. Clearly, what he is talking about, without being explicit, is 'culture', but Renan encounters two problems here. First, the concept of a linguistic race is haunted by the presence of biological race. As Todorov observes, when he writes in De l'Origine du langage, 'The race that speaks Sanscrit [is] an aristocratic and conquering race, distinguished by its white colour from the darker shades of the former inhabitants [of India]' … , we can attribute the aristocratic and conquering spirit to culture; but can we do the same for light and dark skin? (1993, p. 143) Is the mention of skin colour meant to be seen as arbitrary, or does the colour of the skin provide the biological frame for cultural dominance? The concept of linguistic race does not seem to be able to extricate itself from the racialist priority of colour, because linguistic races are, like biological races, situated on a hierarchy of value (indeed the hierarchy of languages is a key feature of Renan's theory).
The second problem is that when positing the deterministic link between language and culture, he must answer the question: which comes rst, language or culture?
The spirit of each people and its language are very closely connected: the spirit creates the language, and the language in turn serves as formula and limit for the spirit. (p. 96) On the face of it, this seems to describe the complex interactive relationship between language and culture, but it represents precisely the dilemma we encounter when we attempt to posit, in a deterministic way, that a culture somehow precedes language. As Todorov asks pertinently, 'can the spirit, as a product of the language, really create the language? ' (1993, p. 143). Or, does the phrase 'formula and limit of the spirit' let Renan off the hook, by suggesting that the spirit of a people somehow creates its own formula and limit? Either way Renan is caught in a circularity which becomes completely tautologous when he says 'It is in fact in the diversity of races that we must seek the most effective cause of the diversity of idioms'. Either 'race' means a linguistic race in which case the 'diversity of idioms' explains the 'diversity of idioms', or else race retains its 'biological' meaning, in which case physical difference somehow causes linguistic difference.
But this contradiction -that the language to which a culture gives birth becomes its restraint and limit -is often repeated by Renan.
As language is, for a race, the very form of its thought, the use of a common language over the centuries becomes, for the family encompassed by it, a mold, a corset, as it were. (Renan, 1887, p. 32) At what point, we might ask, did that energy and creativity of that 'race' which formed the language dissipate into a passivity unable to escape from its limits? This dilemma can be found at the very beginning of Renan's career when he makes an explicit link between race and grammar: 'All the grammatical processes proceed directly from the manner in which each race treated ideas' (Renan,1891, p. 253). If language is the very form of the race's thought, how does its treatment of ideas precede the language in which they are conceived.
We may examine this problem where Renan becomes more speci c about language and race. For at one point he sheets the entire supposed superiority of the Aryan race to its ability to conjugate verbs: The Aryan language was highly superior, especially as regards verb conjugations. This marvellous instrument, created by the instinct of primitive men, contained the seeds of all the metaphysics that would be developed later on by the genius of the Hindus, the Greeks or the Germans. The Semitic language, on the contrary, got off to the wrong start where verbs are concerned. The greatest mistake this race ever made (because the most irreparable) was to adopt such a niggardly mechanism for treating verbs that the expression of tenses and moods has always been imperfect and awkward in its language. Even today, the Arabs are still struggling against the linguistic error committed by their ancestors ten or fteen thousand years ago. (Renan, 1887, p. 35) This is a racial dichotomy quite breathtaking in its scope and we could hardly imagine a more explicit example of cultural determinism. Ten or fteen thousand years ago the Semitic forefathers failed to conjugate verbs properly and because this 'marvellous instrument' contained 'the seeds of all the metaphysics' of the Aryan race (ranging from the Hindus to the Germans!), the Semitic speakers have been stuck with an inferior culture ever since. This starkly exposes the logical problems of a deterministic view of the relationship between language and culture. For how does the 'instinct' of one people create an instrument which contains the seeds of its metaphysics, while the instinct of another becomes circumscribed by its inferior language? If the seeds of a culture's metaphysics are contained in its conjugation of verbs, do those seeds exist before the evolution of verb conjugation or after? If creating the language creates the seeds of its metaphysics, why is the 'genius' of the race proscribed by that instrument? At what point does the creative instinct of a people become bound and limited by the genius of the language it has created?
The contradictions of the concept of linguistic races are compounded in Islamism and Science where he says, 'All the grammatical processes proceed directly from the manner in which each race treated ideas' (Renan, 1888, p. 104). Yet the way a race treats ideas is determined by the grammar of its language. Clearly, the complexity of the relationship between language and culture requires some other explanation. Either the linguistic identity of a culture lies in the ways it uses the language available to it, or the culture can never change, and can never appropriate that which lies outside it. Since the latter is disproved by history, we must conclude that the culture of a people does not lie within language as an inherent property, but in the complex ways in which that people creates, uses, develops, deploys, and engages language. These ways will interact with the historical, geographical, climatic, religious and material experiences of its speakers and the discourses within which those experiences emerge. The support such bizarre claims gave to the racial dichotomies of imperial discourse is clear. If races are primitive today the fault is in their ancestors who created their languages. Needless to say the European nations should move in to 'civilise' them.

Sartre and Fanon
If Renan's connection between race and language were simply an anachronistic element of nineteenth century Orientalism it would remain an historical oddity. But the assumption, that race is somehow embedded in language, has taken a tenacious hold on contemporary thinking because the idea of an essential link is an attractive prospect to both colonisers and colonised. It arises, for instance, as a foundational aspect of Frantz Fanon's view of race. It is not the purpose of this essay to try to suggest any causal lineage from nineteenth century philology to contemporary views of race in language, but rather to point out the paradoxical connection between them. The assumptions about cultural embodiment emerge in the earliest post-colonial writing, but there is a strong tradition in French writers for describing the way in which the French language both dominated and inhibited the expression of 'black' reality. In most cases the link between language and race posited by writers such as Sartre and Fanon is an argument about the cultural speci city of language, although they are not averse to essentialising the situation at times.
In Black Orpheus Jean-Paul Sartre claims that black poetry is essentially a erce response to the inadequacy of language: 'this feeling of failure before language… is the source of all poetic expression' (Sartre, 1948, p. xix). Language, for the black writer was not a neutral, transparent instrument but the determining medium of thought itself. In his pursuit of self-de nition, the black artist saw the inherited colonial language as a pernicious symbolic system used by the European coloniser in order to gain total and systematic control of the mind and reality of the colonised world. In the face of Prospero's hubris, his signifying authority (langue) the African or Caribbean Caliban deployed his own militant idiom (langage). This is a familiar refrain: language embodies the European culture and represses the reality of the African or Caribbean. It is important to understand the great historical and cultural differences between different languages, such as French and English, and their very different roles in the two different forms of imperialism. But the distinction between langue and langage is one that holds for all speakers. Langue becomes the language of the coloniser by virtue of discriminatory assumptions, such as Renan's belief that such things as verb conjugation are a consequence of racial superiority. All language, in its actual use, is langage so there is always in language itself, its amenability to appropriation, its exibility and malleability, the possibility of transformation, of a self expression which resists the imperial con dence of Prospero. Yet this is not what Sartre, nor Fanon after him, are saying. For them, the language is a discourse rmly demarcated by the cultural boundaries of European civilisation.
But the sense of language embodying culture has been a feature of postcolonial resistance writing for a very long time. When we look for the source of this attitude we do not have to go far past Frantz Fanon. The rst chapter of Black Skins White Masks is called 'The Negro and Language' and like Black Orpheus con ates blackness with culture. For Fanon, to speak means 'above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilisation ' (1952, pp. 17-18). But is it the language or the act of using the language, the linguistic tool itself or the fact of one's pro ciency in it, which does this cultural work. 'The Negro of the Antilles', claims Fanon, 'will be proportionately whiter -that is, he will come closer to being a real human being -in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language ' (p. 18). But surely what Fanon means here is that pro ciency in language represents civilisation.
When Fanon says 'A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language' (1952, p. 18), he is articulating one of the central problems of the question of post-colonial language use. For such a person 'possesses' the language, not as a receptacle of culture, thus making him (or her) white, but as a signi er of culture, which, like whiteness, signi es social and cultural dominance. This distinction is in fact crucial to the whole debate over language. The use of language is a signi er of culture, language does not contain that culture: The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle. (1952, p. 18) This sentence is quite correct … metaphorically. The problem is that discussion of language such as Fanon's constantly slips between metaphor and literalism. This sentence is preceded by such a con ation, when he says that every colonised people ' nds itself face to face with the language of the civilising nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country'. How effortless it is to slip between metaphor and metonymy, between the gurative and literal.
We can compare this assumption of status through the use of language with the ways in which language operates as a class marker. Speaking in a re ned way acts as a class marker, a sign of elevation, and indeed the speaker may be making great pains to change into someone of a different class. But the language will only ever be a signi er of that change. There is no secret formula in a language that effects an inner transformation in its speakers. However, in Fanon's view, the change in behaviour is often so marked that the changed language and the changed person are the same thing: The black man who has lived in France for a length of time returns radically changed. To express it in genetic terms, his phenotype undergoes a de nitive, an absolute mutation (1952, p. 19) but what he means by this is explained in a footnote: By that I mean that Negroes who return to their original environments convey the impression that they have completed a cycle, that they have added to themselves something that was lacking. They return literally full of themselves. (p. 19) What Fanon is saying here is an important indication of the social function of language performativity.
However, the problem of a slippage between metaphor and metonymy comes about because of the extreme Manicheanism of race. Fanon, discussing Mayotte Capécia's Je suis Martiniquaise, says that it would seem 'that for her white and black represent the two poles of a world, two poles in perpetual con ict: a genuinely Manichean concept of the world' (1952, pp. 44-45): I am white: that is to say that I possess beauty and virtue, which have never been black. I am the colour of the daylight … I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of my ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo (p. 45) Consequently, for Fanon, 'The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation ' (1952, p. 60). The tendency to see this enslavement as an enslavement of language denies the post-colonial subject one of the most potent weapons of discursive resistance: an adaptable and transformable language and the readership it brings with it.

Race and Writing
The belief, inherited from nineteenth century philology, that language actually embodies cultural difference rather than inscribes or articulates it, is one of the most tenacious in contemporary theory. Far from ending with Fanon this assumption persists to the present day. It extends into an even more impassioned assertion of the embodiment of culture in language in post-colonial writers such as Ngugi wa Thiongo. 4 Although the historical link between language and race has proved dif cult to dislodge it is nowhere disrupted more comprehensively than in post-colonial language use, and speci cally post-colonial writing in English. Ironically, Ngugi's writing itself demonstrates a capacity for resistance that is denied by his theory. The question of language and race goes right to the heart of the problematic character of discursive resistance. Writing on the connection between 'race' and 'writing' Henry Louis Gates voices a widespread disillusionment with the political possibilities of 'black' writing: Can writing, with the difference it makes and marks, mask the blackness of the black face that addresses the text of Western letters, in a voice that speaks English through an idiom which contains the irreducible element of cultural difference that will always separate the white voice from the black? Black people, we know, have not been liberated from racism by our writings. We accepted a false premise by assuming that racism would be destroyed once white racists became convinced that we were human, too. Writing stood as a complex 'certi cate of humanity', as Paulin Hountondji put it. Black writing, and especially the literature of the slave, served not to obliterate the difference of race; rather the inscription of the black voice in Western literatures has preserved those very cultural differences to be repeated, imitated and revised in a separate Western literary tradition, a tradition of black difference. (1986, p. 12) This pessimism has been shared by many writers and critics. But to think that racism would be destroyed by black writing is like assuming that injustice will be destroyed by 'just' writing, or by writing on justice. When we remember the history of these race terms 'black' and 'white' we see how much our problems of race are problems of language. This metaphoric term coined with so little regard for the complexity and diversity of ethnic groups, is now deployed as a universal political identi er. Is there any wonder that the term and 'its' productions should be found wanting?
This is not to belittle the history of very real material suffering and oppression suffered by 'black' peoples. But this suffering has been largely a consequence of a worldwide economic and political adventure -European imperialism. 'Black' and 'white' simply reverse the hierarchy of binary terms rather than erase the binary. The broad sweep of post-colonising literatures brings together a much more diverse constituency. But the very use of the terms 'black' and 'white' show that we cannot escape history, nor escape that discourse which constantly attempts to construct us. For many people the question of identity is, as a consequence of that history, overwhelmingly a question of colour, no matter how metaphoric those colour terms may be. And the dominance discourse will continue to construct its others. For both 'black writing' and 'post-colonial writing' (which are not the same thing) the alternative to taking Prospero's voice and speaking back is Caliban's -silence or cursing.
Despite this pessimism it is evident that Gates is talking about a revolution in literary expression which aims at a true appropriation rather than a literature which becomes absorbed by the canon. When he turns to criticism his alternatives are much more cannily expressed. Speaking of Jacques Derrida's challenge 'to speak the other's language without renouncing [our] own' Gates observes that he once thought that the task of the black critic was to master the Western critical canon and apply it but 'now I believe that we must turn to the black tradition itself to develop theories of criticism indigenous to our literatures ' (1986, p. 13). This is indeed the discovery of post-colonial criticism: theory does not exist in a vacuum; it has a history and a culture. That is not to say that aspects of any critical theory may not be appropriated where necessary. Theory which takes no account of the local becomes imperial by default. But whether theory also has a colour is less evident. Indeed, it is dif cult to see how the concept of 'black' literature and theory, a 'black tradition', can avoid the racialist dynamic it aims to combat. It is not just advisable but crucial that post-colonial intellectuals realise that language has no race, for the consequence of this link -when it leads to the rejection of tools of discursive resistance such as the English language -has been to imprison resistance in an inward looking world. The ultimate consequence of the belief that language embodies race is the deafening silence of a rage that cannot be heard. South Wales, UNSW Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia, e-mail: B.Ashcroft@unsw.edu.au. Notes 1. The terms by which the play describes Caliban are so inconsistent and of such variety that they represent a virtual crisis of representation in the description of the other. Lacking any clear linguistic framework such as that provided by racial terminology, Caliban has been a role open to every interpretation imaginable. The power of language to 'other' the colonised subject emerges from the arbitrary visual status accorded Caliban. He is 'a strange sh!' (II.ii.27); 'Legg'd like a man! and his ns like arms!' (II.ii.34); 'no sh' (II.ii.36); 'some monster of the isle with four legs' (II,ii.66); 'a plain sh' (V.i.266); and a 'mis-shapen knave' (V.i.268). Morton Luce sums up this contradiction succinctly: 'if all the suggestions as to Caliban's form and features and endowments that are thrown out in the play are collected, it will be found that the one half renders the other half impossible' (Hulme, 1986, p. 107). The apparently confused and ambiguous representation of Caliban comes about because notions of race had not coalesced into clear physiological parameters when Shakespeare wrote, and were not to be so for a century and a half. 2. This momentous beginning was elaborated in 1819 by Jacob Grimm's Deutsch Grammatik, and placed on a rm scienti c basis by Franz Bopp's Comparative Grammar, 1833-35. 3. The hypothesis, that the laws of phonetic change admit of no exceptions was rst stated by August Leskien in 1876, and again by Herman Paul in 1879: 'Every phonetic law operates with absolute necessity; it as little admits of an exception as a chemical or physical law'. This is an example of a tendency towards the rigid structuration of language which has dogged linguistics. 'On the face of it', says Brew, 'the neogrammarian hypothesis appeared to ignore, and to be atly contradicted by, the known exceptions to every one of the major regularities of phonetic correspondence between related languages ' (1968, p. 177). We see this disturbance of linguistic theory time and again as post-colonial societies appropriate language for their purposes, demonstrating the extreme elasticity of languages. 4. An account of contemporary views of linguistic cultures is the subject of another essay but for discussions of some myths about language and its relation to race and culture, see Ashcroft, 1987;1989;2001.